Science Quote by Jack Schwartz

Schwartz is pushing back against a seductive political story: that Jews in Israel/Palestine function like a familiar European colonial elite, parachuted in to rule “helpless natives.” His phrasing is surgical. “Not part of a European ruling class” rejects the moral shortcut that lets outsiders file the conflict under a single, settled category. It’s less a defense of policy than a defense of complexity, aimed at audiences who treat analogy as verdict.

The sentence turns on “but are caught up,” shifting agency and guilt. “Caught up” frames Jews not as masterminds but as participants in forces larger than any one faction: nationalism, displacement, postwar refugee flows, and competing historical claims. That move doesn’t erase power differences on the ground; it reframes intent. Schwartz is arguing that whatever dominance exists cannot be reduced to the classic metropole-to-colony pipeline. The subtext is a warning about moral performance: if you cast one side as the obvious villain and the other as purely passive, you stop seeing the choices, traumas, and fears that keep the conflict combustible.

Calling it “a tragedy” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting. Tragedy implies inevitability, mutual suffering, and the absence of clean catharsis. “Two peoples” insists on symmetrical nationhood, not a state versus a population. “The same piece of land” is blunt, almost impolite in its simplicity, stripping away theology and ideology to a material core: scarcity, borders, homes.

As a scientist, Schwartz’s voice carries the cadence of a corrective memo: resist the easy model, acknowledge competing variables. The risk, of course, is that tragedy-talk can slide into fatalism, flattering the observer’s sophistication while dulling urgency about current injustices.